There is a particular kind of loneliness that only Schoenberg understood — the loneliness of standing in the ruins of something beautiful that you yourself helped demolish.
The LaSalle Quartet spent the better part of the early 1970s inside that ruin, and what they brought back from Deutsche Grammophon's sessions with this four-disc set is one of the great acts of musical excavation in the recording catalog. Released in 1975, it remains the authoritative complete survey of Schoenberg's four string quartets, plus the early D major quartet that he chose never to publish. The LaSalle — Walter Levin and Henry Meyer on violins, Peter Kamnitzer on viola, Jack Kirstein on cello — had been playing together since their formation at Juilliard in 1946. By the time they made this record, they had been living with Schoenberg for decades. It shows.
What These Quartets Actually Are
People avoid this music for the wrong reason. They hear "atonal" and assume they will feel nothing. But the Second Quartet, with soprano Heather Harper floating above the strings on Stefan George's poetry — Ich löse mich in Tönen — is one of the most emotionally naked pieces of the twentieth century. Schoenberg was still grieving, still furious, still recognizably human when he wrote it in 1908.
The Third and Fourth Quartets, written under the twelve-tone method, are harder. They ask more. But they reward patience in the way a dense novel does on a second read — the architecture reveals itself slowly, and then suddenly you can't stop hearing it.
The Sessions, The Sound
Deutsche Grammophon recorded this in Munich, and the engineering is clinical in the best sense. Every inner voice sits in its own space. You can follow Kamnitzer's viola through passages where lesser recordings bury it entirely, and that matters enormously in music where the counterpoint is the argument.
The production notes and accompanying essays — this was released as a box set with substantial scholarly annotation — were considered almost as important as the performances themselves. Schoenberg scholar and biographer H.H. Stuckenschmidt contributed extensively. DG understood they were making a document, not just a product.
Walter Levin spoke in interviews about the quartet's approach: not to soften the edges, not to perform these works as if they were exotic objects to be handled carefully, but to play them with the same physical commitment you'd bring to Beethoven. That conviction is audible. There is no tentativeness here, no sense that the players are navigating around the difficulty. They walk straight into it.
The unpublished D major Quartet — written around 1897, posthumously catalogued as part of the complete works — functions almost as a prologue to the set. It's late romantic, confident, completely conventional. Hearing it before you reach the Second Quartet makes the distance Schoenberg traveled feel vertiginous.
I came back to this box after years away and was genuinely shaken by how much I'd forgotten about listening at this level of attention. Put it on in a quiet room. Not as background. Give it the same silence you'd give a difficult conversation with someone you love.